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Thursday, 21st April, 11am AEDT
Online
11.00AM – Cam Knight – Stand-up Comic
11.10AM – Guy Desharnais – How Cognitive Biases are Crippling the Mining Industry
11.50PM – Happy Hour – Q&A + Networking
The mining industry is strewn with failed projects, with many more that are chronically underperforming. The list of excuses for the failures is long: resource overestimation, unrepresentative metallurgical testing, bad design, poor cost estimates, and inadequate community engagement to name a few.
These are often reported as “technical issues”, somehow insinuating that they are normal and unavoidable. As a matter of fact, each failure or shortcoming is caused by humans that made unsound decisions.
Cognitive science shows us how our brains alter perception to trick us into making irrational choices. As with most accidents, several factors contribute to cause mining professionals to make poor decisions. Taken individually, errors tend to have a linear impact; but combined they conspire to create exponentially worse outcomes. The mining industry is bound to continue its chronic underperformance and stakeholder disappointment until it deals with the human factors that are warping our feasibility studies.
Thrilled to have Guy Desharnais from Osisko Gold Royalties Ltd joining us this week on geohug to tackle cognitive biases. Come join the discussion.
Guy Desharnais obtained a Ph.D. that focused on belt-scale geochemistry of mafic-ultramafic rocks and related sulphide mineralization. He worked five years as an exploration geologist with Xstrata Nickel (Glencore) before transitioning to consulting work. He managed the SGS Geostat team for several years, working on a wide range of projects internationally, from resource estimations, economic evaluations, metallurgical sample selection, geometallurgical studies, and audits of resources and reserves. He was part of the team which won the Integra Gold Rush Challenge in 2016 (500k$) which applied a combination of geology, virtual reality, weight of evidence and machine learning techniques to identify the most prospective exploration targets. He is currently working as Vice President of Project Evaluation with Osisko Gold Royalties, and is on the Mining Technical Advisory and Monitoring Committee for the Canadian Securities Administrators.
Cam Knight
Cam has been an actor and stand up comedian for the past 16 years and was the co-host of a brand new show on Channel 9 called Unreal Estate alongside Kate Langbroek in 2016. He has regularly appeared on the Today show, co-hosted Studio 10 on Channel 10 and can be heard as a weekly co-host on Triple M’s Merrickville and The Weekenders with Dan Ginane in Sydney.
